The emotions of the Olympics, in real time

When Rowan Atkinson made an unexpected appearance during the opening ceremony of the London Olympic Games on Friday, I let out a yelp of surprise and delight. And a new, live data visualisation dedicated to capturing the flickering emotions inspired by the games showed that I wasn’t the only one tickled by the sight of Mr Bean.

As Atkinson engaged in some light daydreaming, I turned to Emoto2012.org and watched as tweets related to his appearance whizzed by. A quick glance at a “swarm” visualisation made it clear that viewers were thrilled to see him. The design, which resembles a pair of curling ribbons - one in shades of red and orange and the other in hues of blue - lets you take the temperature of public sentiment in real time.

The system scans English-language Twitter accounts for tweets about the games and sifts for words that convey emotion, revealing some interesting insights about the way the world’s biggest sporting event is driving public conversation. In the swarm visualisations, for a given subject, the total number of tweets is indicated by a dotted grey circle. Whether feelings are positive or negative about the topic is shown by the size of the coloured ribbons that extend out of the circle. During the opening ceremony on Friday, for example, tweets about its mastermind, director Danny Boyle, were overwhelmingly favourable: a giant orange pennant extended at the top of the visualisation, while there was just a speck of blue pointing downward beneath.

Initially, Stefaner says, the hope was to scan more social media sites across a variety of languages to capture a global portrait of how the Olympic games were perceived, but that proved to be too difficult without undermining the quality of the data. “Of course we can try to harvest the web,” Stefaner says, “but we want to make sure that the sentiment analysis we do is accurate and not just made-up. From a resource point of view, we realised we can only do it in a simple configuration.”

A big source of inspiration for the project was We Feel Fine, another site which uses bursts of colour to present real-time portraits of emotions expressed on Twitter, designed by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar.

What distinguishes Emoto is its focus on the Olympics. Where We Feel Fine is about diversity and mass, Emoto delivers immediate insights about how people are responding to just one event.

Today, for instance, British diver Tom Daley is at the heart of an Emoto swarm. The 18-year-old athlete was the subject of some cruel commentary over Twitter after he and fellow diver Peter Waterfield came away empty-handed from the synchronised diving competition. Yet the swarm of Twitter emotion captured by Emoto made it clear that those harsh sentiments are in the minority.

Not only can you use the swarm maps to look at the way people are reacting to live events, but after the fact Stefaner and his colleagues will save data visualisations as a digital record. Once the games wrap up, Emoto will also leave a physical legacy. A three-dimensional artwork that depicts the emotions expressed across the 19 days of the games will be put on display in Preston, UK, in September.

“All of the highs and lows of the game will be presented as a relief landscape,” says Stefaner. “It will be a sort of counterpoint of the web version, where it’s all very ephemeral.”

The Emoto project will run throughout the London 2012 Olympic Games, and a sculpture will be on show at the WE PLAY Expo from 7 to 9 September in Preston, UK.